Minnesota Bio-Fuels Association’s executive director, Brian Werner, participated in a webinar on Clean Fuel Tax Credits today.
Other participants in the webinar included The Minnesota Farmers Union, The Minnesota Corn Growers Association and The Minnesota Soybean Growers Association. The webinar focused on the 40B tax credit guidance and what it means for both the biofuels and agriculture industries.
During his portion of the webinar, Werner illustrated ethanol’s lifecycle emissions and the need for its carbon intensity to be measured by the Department of Energy’s GREET model instead of the International Civial Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) model for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
In particular, he said ICAO’s modeling relied on outdated data on ethanol’s lifecycle emissions from 2012 and non-US sources. In contrast, the GREET model, he said, is updated annually to reflect changes and improvements and uses the most up-to-date data and assumptions about crop and biofuel production.
Werner also spoke the regulatory requirements under the 40B SAF tax credit for SAF-qualifying feedstocks which includes all-or-nothing climate smart agriculture practices such as establishing cover crops which is difficult in the northern corn belt.
Finally, he pointed out to the costs, time and certainty associated with environmental permitting for ethanol plants to lower their carbon index scores. He said the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s review times for permits was six times longer than other neighboring states, thus putting Minnesota’s ethanol industry at a significant disadvantage.
View the full presentation for the Clean Fuel Tax Credits webinar here.
You can view a recording of this webinar in its entirety below.